


a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace

by yonderdarling



Series: that hashtag vault lyfe [4]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gen, Vomiting, Wanky inclusion of poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2017-06-07
Packaged: 2018-11-10 02:47:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11118294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yonderdarling/pseuds/yonderdarling
Summary: "The crying gets worse. It goes from quiet, tearful contemplation to racking sobs, moves into what the Doctor has to name hysteria, and remembers seeing it in himself." Three days in the Vault once Missy begins to remember the names.





	a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace

**Author's Note:**

> Posting it so I stop poking it with a stick. Thanks to Chris for all his support and feedback. Spoilers for most of series 10, obviously. 
> 
> I feel like if I had a dollar for every time I wrote the Doctor and Missy having emotional chats and crying in bed, I'd have a lot more money than I do right now.

 

The crying gets worse. It goes from quiet, tearful contemplation to racking sobs, moves into what the Doctor has to name hysteria, and remembers seeing it in himself.

It's been three days. When Missy isn't in tears, she's fidgety, pacing, unable to stop moving around the Vault, eyes darting. When she's not walking mindlessly she's writing names, name after name after name on scraps of paper, starting new lists in alphabetical, chronological, reverse-chronological. Clockwise out from Gallifrey; the Sacrilliean method of planetary transversal order.

She has another set of lists. Planets she's destroyed. There are far too many.

"Almost as many as mine," the Doctor says, sitting beside her on the couch.

"Yours got brought back," says Missy, and she tears the paper up, holds it in her hands.

The Doctor holds his own hands out, and Missy pours the confetti into his palms. It rustles softly in the silent Vault. As she sits, Missy shuffles her feet.

"You should walk again."

"I should walk again," Missy echoes, her accent strange, and she moves.

The Doctor sits, and waits, and watches her. She tells him (for the ninth time) that she hasn't slept for four weeks, and that explains all the weird stuff with her sliding around on the piano in front of Bill (he chooses to believe) and the knots in her hair and the broken dishes in the bin. She has a bin. They couldn't give her a matter-destroyer. Obvious reasons, despite her early complaints.

"Why can't you sleep?"

Missy sits on the end of the bed, shakes her head at him. The old bedframe squeaks at the tiniest movement.

"Nightmares?"

This time, he gets a nod.

The Doctor puts the paper scraps, covered with the swirling Gallifreyan names of planets, on the table, dusts off his hands. "Missy - "

"Stay with me," she says, staring at the floor. "Please." She stands, meets his gaze. "I'm asking for your help." For some reason, she's suddenly using a very formal version of High Gallifreyan, the kind reserved for respected Cardinals; for Presidents, back when they were respectable. My Lord Doctor. I need your wisdom. I need your experience. I need your time. I need your help.

He pauses. He doesn't know why. Perhaps he's becoming crueler in his old age.

"Would you like me on the couch or on the bed?"

A muscle in Missy's jaw ticks. "Do you have to make me say it?"

He could. He shakes his head, kicks his boots off. "Dinner?" the Doctor asks. "What have you got in?"

"I'm not hungry."

And this is when he needs to be harsh. "You're eating."

 

 

She does.

 

 

In the middle of the night-cycle, Missy bolts out of bed, kicks him in the kidneys in the process. The lights fade on automatically as she runs to the bathroom, slams the door. Still. The Doctor rubs his gritty eyes as the sounds of her retching fill the room.

He sits in the bed for a while, smoothing the wrinkles out of his pillow out with his fingers. The toilet flushes, and there's the sound of running water. He pulls back the blankets and pads across to the bathroom door, knocks lightly.

"I'm fine," comes Missy's voice, her tone flat and dark. She sniffs. "Uck. Can you - could you - "

He waits, pressing his forehead against the light wood.

"Could you get my dressing gown, please? I think I'm going to be in here for a while."

It is cold. The Doctor fetches her dressing gown (yellow, fluffy, a daffodil embroidered on the pocket - it had been Romana's) and knocks on the door again. Missy opens it a crack, holds out her thin, pale hand.

"No need to be so coy," he says, holding the dressing gown out of his reach. "You're not sick. I've seen you much worse."

Missy tsks, opens the door wider. She glares out at him, dark shadows under her eyes, made more dramatic by her pale skin; her hair a mess.

"You look like Helena Bonham Carter," says the Doctor. "In - all her bad movies."

Missy ups her glare. He hands her the dressing gown, and she opens the door properly, slings the robe on and sits gracelessly on the tiled floor. She sniffs, rubs her eyes. She's still crying.

"It just keeps - coming out of my eyes. I'm so tired of this."

"I hope you mean tears, not sick," the Doctor says. "I had that once. On Salakassar. Ate a bad bratwurst."

Missy snickers, but there's no levity in it, playing with the hem of her dressing gown. She stares down at her fingers. The Doctor sinks down onto the floor next to her, the cold of the tiles immediately numbing his legs.

"It's freezing," he says.

Wordlessly Missy hands him a towel to sit on.

"I had a dream," she says, still not looking at him, picking at the threads. "I saw - "

Eyes darting around the bathroom, everywhere but him, and the Doctor waits.

"What I did to your handsome Jack," she says, shooting for sarcasm, but her voice cracks. Missy drops her head back into her hands, shakes it. "I did - "

"Sick things," says the Doctor, clenching his jaw, forcing himself to reach out.

Missy flinches when he touches her back, tenses as he rubs patterns between her shoulderblades. "Missy."

"I - " Missy says, then twitches, brushing him off. Her voice is muffled by her hands. "Go back to bed."

"You want to go back to bed?"

"No, you go," Missy says. "I can't look at you right now."

"What?" The Doctor leans back a little. "Missy is this - you're still remembering names?"

"I'm remembering how I used to do - I used to be, I used to be," she's speaking in a stumbling, child's form of Gallifreyan. "I used to. I was an artist," she says, and gags.

She throws herself at the toilet and vomits again, holding her hair back with one hand. The Doctor sighs, stands, fills a plastic cup with water for her. He waits while Missy retches, coughs, spits, wipes her hand over the back of her mouth roughly.

"Nks," she says, rinsing her mouth out. She spits noisily, then swears.

The Doctor leans across and flushes the toilet. Missy curls on the floor, presses her sweaty forehead to the tiles.

"Drink the rest of it, Missy. Please," says the Doctor, and she does. He refills the cup. "Come on."

"Please don't help me," she says in a small voice. "The things I did to - you, to so many people."

"Drink. Stop talking like a child. It's creepy."

Missy sits up, still crumpled like some kind of bright yellow bird of prey. She takes the cup and slurps at it loudly.

"I mean I knew it was wrong, but what gains did I take from - " she blows out her cheeks, sniffs. Looks up at him, squinting through her puffy eyes. "Really, Doctor. Go back to bed. I'm going to be here a while."

The Doctor shifts, foot to foot. "You're sure?"

"Mm."

He vaguely considers kissing her on the temple, but Missy leans away before he can make up his mind. The Doctor reaches out, presses a hand to her forehead.

"You're a bit cold," he says. "Maybe take a hot shower. It might make you feel better."

She shakes her head.

He goes back to the creaky bed, but he can't sleep; partially because the lights are slaved to Missy's needs and she's up and about, or at least down and out but mostly conscious. Mostly though, on his mental landscape, it's Missy, a few metres away, reliving the Year That Never Was through someone else's eyes. She's the proverbial lead weight on a rubber sheet.

He must drift off at one point (it's been a long six months) or perhaps Missy puts him out, because suddenly he's awake again and there's cold hands and feet against him, the smell of mouthwash and disinfectant and Missy's shampoo (lavender), and her nose pressing into his neck. On the wrong side of his neck.

Disorientated, the Doctor opens his eyes. In the fading light he sees Missy's side of the bed is empty. She's bundled herself in next to him on his side, millimetres of mattress separating her from a short drop to the cold floor.

The Doctor loops his arm under her thin waist and rolls them both over to the middle of the bed. Still, Missy clings to him, shivering.

"How long will this take?" she mumbles, lips brushing his throat. "Doctor. Doctor. I'm so sorry."

He stares at the darkness around them. "This is good," he says again. "I'm sorry, too."

There's a few minutes of silence, the only noise the blankets rustling as Missy shakes.

"I think you're all cried out," he says. "For now."

"I'm sorry."

"Sh. Are you cold?"

She nods. 

They entwine their legs, Missy's feet freezing against his shins. She shifts so she's on top of him properly, their chests pressed together, one of her hips digging into his middle, the bedsprings clinking. Missy tucks one hand under his armpit, slides her free arm up under the pillows, her face shoved into his neck and hair. Her lips part slightly, and he feels her breath against his skin.

The Doctor rubs her back again, the fabric damp from her sweat. He tips his head awkwardly, presses their temples together, hears Missy's vague bemused thought before she needs to vocalise it.

"Yes, I did say coy," he murmurs, and feels her smile. He keeps rubbing her back. "But it wasn't deliberate. Look, can you move a bit? I think you're about to take out my spleen."

Missy slides off him, back onto what's technically his side of the mattress, presses her hand over one of his hearts. The Doctor puts his hand over her own, feels her cold fingers, rubs them to warm them.

"You might dream again," says the Doctor, and Missy makes a low noise, like an injured animal. "I might dream. I'm here for you through this, Missy."

"What I did to you - " she says, and he tenses under her grip. "Doctor - "

"Tomorrow," says the Doctor, closing his eyes. "I don't want to go back through that year in the dark. And there's going to be so much talking," he adds. "This will take time."

Missy giggles, but it's shaky. She sniffs.

"What?"

She clears her throat. The Doctor turns his head and presses their foreheads together. She's warm enough, her temperature back up to a normal range.

"What is it?" he asks again.

"Your coy Mistress," she says. "I suppose, we do have time. Doctor."

"Missy." He bumps his forehead against hers gently, but she stays silent. "What is it?"

"Will you talk until I fall asleep?"

"You said that it usually only takes three seconds of one of my lectures to send you off."

Missy shifts, pressing ever-closer to him, like she wants to occupy the exact same point in the universe at the exact same time. For a second, he sees her lying across the bed in bright daylight, month four, day three of no one coming to see her, no messages, no communication, sounds of the Time War screaming in her head.

"Missy."

"Doctor."

"Close your eyes." He pauses. "Are they closed?"

"Yes." A whisper in the dark.

It's pitch black. The Doctor can't think of anything to say that isn't harsh, and she's had days, weeks, months, years of harsh, and they're both exhausted. He squeezes her side, rubs his thumb along the bone of her hip. It takes a moment for the words to come back to him - he hasn't thought of the poem in a good few hundred years.

"Had we but world enough, and time," he says, and Missy sighs. "This coyness, Lady, were no crime/We would sit down and think which way to walk and pass our long love's day./Thou by the Indian Ganges' side shouldst rubies find: I by the tide/Of Humber would complain. I would love you ten years before the Flood,/and you should, if you please, refuse/Till the conversion of the Jews - "

"That bit has not aged well," Missy says, her voice sleep-slurred.

"We'll go back and get him to change the line one day," says the Doctor. "My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires, and more slow/A hundred years should go to praise/Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;/Two hundred to adore each breast/But thirty thousand to the rest/An age at least to every part/And the last age should show your heart."

He pauses, reaches out with his mind, finds Missy's brainwaves smoothing into sleep. Her breathing is low and even, as she curls further into him, snuffling, seeking warmth and familiarity in the blackness of the Vault.

The Doctor lowers his voice. "For, Lady, you deserve this state/Nor would I love at lower rate."

The Doctor brings his hand up, runs it through Missy's tangled hair. He feels his way down the bed, finds the edge of the blankets, and tugs them up to their chins, tucking it carefully along Missy's back.

The Doctor closes his eyes, and then opens them again, a clear image of the Valiant's stateroom filling his vision. He rubs his mouth, holds Missy tighter.

He can't sleep. If he sleeps, Missy will pick up on his dreams. He'll pick up on hers.

The Doctor runs his hand up and down Missy's spine, and sets his teeth. He's too tired to think.

"Mr and Mrs Dursley," he says finally, keeping his tone even, seeing the book in front of him. "Of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense."

He's halfway through reciting the second chapter when Missy finally makes a soft noise, releases him, rolls onto her other side. Yet, she presses up against him, and the Doctor rolls over, his chest to her back, his nose cold in her hair.

"Do you remember when we were younger, and we planned on travelling together?" he says, voice hoarse. "We both had lists, the top fourteen planets we wanted to see, the top fourteen times, and we had six in common on one, and five on the other? Out of all and space and time, eleven being the same of twenty-eight is an incredible hit rate. We had such promise. We knew each other so well."

Missy sighs, shifting against him. He bends his knees so his legs fit in with hers.

"We've always known each other. It's one of our great strengths. It's also - we always try to make each other into what we think we should be. And that is a terrible weakness. But you chose this. You chose this. This is new."

On the bedside table, his phone lights up, horribly bright in the pitch black. The Doctor reaches over Missy, grabs it, turns the brightness down. A message from Nardole.

 

NARDOLE: It's awfully quiet in there. Everything okay?

 

The Doctor pauses. He slides over to the cold side of the bed, takes a moment to compose the message.

 

DOCTOR: She's sleeping. Worked through some things.

NARDOLE: Please tell me that's not a euphemism.

DOCTOR: You're fired, and it's not.

NARDOLE: I'm right outside if you need a hand. Do you still want those sedatives?

DOCTOR: Just put them in my office. 

 

The Doctor puts the phone down, covers his face with his hands and watches the blue lights waving across his vision, the after-images of the bright phone screen. All is quiet and dark for a while. Perhaps he drifts off. His eyes shoot open against when there's a low, pained noise.

"Hey, hey," he says. "Hey, I'm here."

He moves back over to Missy. She shifts, the mattress moving below her, the bed squeaking, settles again, one arm thrown over his chest.

"Shall I keep going with the book?"

"He's annoying," Missy mumbles.

"Well. I'm not giving up on you yet. You'll learn to like Harry Potter."

"And then there's strudel," she adds. "Should we get more chalk? Doctor?"

"Missy."

"Doctor?" she says, still asleep. "I love you. My friend." A snuffle. "I love you."

He exhales. There it is. The Doctor lifts his arm, finds Missy's waist and hugs her to him.

"What happens then?" she mumbles.

"He finds out he's a wizard," the Doctor says. "Goes off to boarding school. Has a better time than we did, all up."

"Good, good, good," Missy murmurs. "Did the labrador do the thing?"

The Doctor chuckles, and jolts Missy. She stirs. Her hand comes up and cups his face, fingers warm. "What is it?" she asks, voice slurred.

The Doctor takes a moment, thinking in the dark. "Just talking to you. You answered."

"Mm." Missy tucks her head under his jaw, sighs. "Did you finish the poem?"

"I can't remember the rest. Something about death. I didn't think you'd like hearing it."

"Mhm. I remember it," she murmurs. "I won't say it. It's sad. It's so sad."

With one hand, the Doctor rearranges his pillow so his neck isn't cricked. Then he reaches over and smooths Missy's hair down, feeling the coarse strands in his fingers. She hums.

"Thank you," Missy says.

"Close your eyes. Go to sleep," the Doctor says. "I'll be here in the morning."

 

She does.

 

 

He is. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading - feedback is greatly appreciated!


End file.
